To Dream of Heaven
by sylphides
Summary: Short one-shot on Susan after her entire family goes to Narnia. Deeply religious piece, don't like don't read. Contemplative.


Disclaimer: The world of Narnia does not belong to moi. CS Lewis is a genius, and I merely have fun with his genius.

Warning: If you don't do religious themes, stop and read something else. This is very VERY Christian. It is, after all, how CS Lewis meant the Chronicles of Narnia to be.

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The day they died, I died along with them.

I do not remember any portion of this time in my life; only echoes, echoes of laughter, tears, loss. Echoes of the children we once where, the young adults we had become before the nothingness.

Sara told me later that I had lain in bed for days after hearing the news, too ill to move or speak, sleeping the sleep of the dead – to wake up briefly and turn back to death for comfort. I only remember the ceiling. A high, white-washed affair, sturdy and centuries old and still strong with no cracks at all in the paint. I remember wishing in one of the brief occasion in between the numbing madness that descended upon me, that it would come crashing down and bring with it sweet oblivion.

When I finally fully awoke and rose from my death-bed, I was a different person than the young woman who had been carried onto it. Sara was the only one I could bear to have around me. She sat in silence with me, as the shadows moved from one side of the room to the other, lengthening and shrinking with the sun's journey in the sky overhead. Several other people, women mostly, tried to help. They fussed and clucked around me – poor young thing, lost both parents and all my siblings in one fell swoop. I don't remember using words – Sara says that I didn't break my silence for over a year. I do not remember. Somehow, I communicated. They left. And the silence remained.

At first the silence was a heavy thing – as heavy as the dark shadows cast by thick stone walls decades old. It was all I could do to breathe and live. And yet living was not an act of will or a choice – something dragged me from blessed slumber and back into the world. I had obeyed: I could not now go back.

Slowly, the silence changed, shaped itself around me. It did not become less heavy – rather, it took on a distinctive quality, almost, as Lucy might have, would have said, almost like a friend who is helping you grieve for something you lost by sitting with you. Or perhaps, I recalled vaguely, faintly, like the sweet, warm breath of a lion. And the silence became tranquil, almost like the peace of a mother tucking you in – allowing you to sink into the most delicious sensation of oblivion to all around you. Warm breath reassuring life in one thought dead. I did not question it, only accepted it and continued – to live.

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During the day I was all right, peaceful, calm even. Calm in numbness. I did the most inconsequential of things. I knitted a scarf. I swept the floor. I sat and rocked in my chair, mindless of past, present, or future. The night was a different matter.

At night, I shivered in bed. More, more logs! I tried to tell them – perhaps with words, perhaps only with my mute eyes. Bigger! Build the fire bigger! Make it warmer, make it lighter – lighter – so that I may not have to see the dark. But the dark lurked in the darkness whenever I closed my eyelids – regardless of the glare thrown by the fire crackling in the hearth. At night, every night, in my dreams, I remembered.

I remembered who I was. I remembered what had happened, what had brought me here, living each second with no thought for it or for its predecessor or descendant. They came to me in my sleep – figures haunting my every dream. "Susan!" They called. "Susan! Come with us! Come to Narnia! We're such having a jolly time. Why didn't you come with us? Why didn't you come? Why didn't you come? Susan! Susan!" Until my ears rang with my name and with the question – why?

And worst of all, as my ears rang with pleas from my dearest friends – my brothers and sister – dearer still came a voice to me. "Susan why have you forsaken me? Susan, I died before your very eyes – for you – for your brother – for the world you loved. Why have you forsaken that world Susan? Why have you forgotten your childlike faith?" And the wild, rich voice, the voice of a King – or a lion – filled my ears, my mind, my body, driving all else out before it. The whys resounded in my head, shook loose the answers, and strode away as if disgusted by the hollow sound of flammable wood rather than a clear ring of pure metal.

The earth my mortal body was bound to finally broke my year of silence, as well as my year of true dreams. Sara, the dear woman who had stayed with me, grieved with me, become almost an extension of me, finally one day – as we were strolling outside in the secluded park that was the backyard of her uncle's manor – and asked me how I would like it if we had chicken for dinner rather than beef. I answered her as if it were the most natural thing to do – except for the fact that my voice was a whisper, uncertain and rusty with disuse.

We walked back to the manor wrapped in shreds of my silence – not a torn jagged scar, but more like a soft blanket cut in half but still warm and soft.

After that, it was not long before I began rejoicing, without noticing it, in small things. I smiled with pure pleasure as I witnessed the sun, bursting from the horizon into the star-dotted-skies and changing the quiet dark of night to a sleepy dawn of morning. Joy tapped in my heart as I ran over the overgrown lawn towards the sprawling mansion for the simple fun of running healthy and strong through dew-drenched grass.

My sleep became an unbroken melody, with sweet unconsciousness itself welcoming me on the shores of slumber.

Once upon a time, our names were separated only with great difficulty. We became known almost as one person – PeterSusanEdmundLucy. Or SusanPeterLucyEdmond. It didn't matter the order of the names – just the entity itself.

I mused as I brushed my long hair, which now fell just past my waist. My siblings and I. We had had such fun, such ramblings, such arguments, such joy in the same thing. We had grown up together, been through the terror of the World War together, been banished together, borne sorrow together, fought battles together…Wait. The hand that held the brush faltered. I lowered it and stared into the mirror. A young woman – dare I say lovely of features? – stared back at me, large doe-eyes wide, cherry-lips slightly parted. Had I just thought battles? And at the word, my mind's eye seemed to recover a vision of the past – proud warriors mounted on glorious horses, sun glinting off armor, trumpets blaring, staring down at a sea of foe and friend past the clean line of an arrow waiting to be released from a strung bow tautly, expertly, held in my own gauntleted hands.

Yet I knew that it was impossible. England and other countries had long ago replaced the outdated tradition of bow and arrows and soldiers on horseback and on foot charging each other with trenches, bombs, and gunfire. Besides, the green place I seemed to remember was a beautiful place with magic abounding. Beautiful girls – trees? – floated – Nymphs? An uncommonly large beaver conversing – in human speech – with a creature that was half man, half horse – centaur, the vague part of my brain reminded me.

I did not remember the before or after – nor when this might have happened. Carefully, I let the image fade back into nothingness, this wisp of the past that I did not remember. I was content for now to let things be.

Sometimes, I could not comprehend it. The pain would knife through my stomach, doubling me over and crippling me for days – weeks – at a time. My serious elder brother Peter, who had always tried to protect us, dead! My sometimes awkward, quick-witted and sharp-minded little brother Edmund, gone! My laughing, joyous, bubbling of life little sister, silenced forever! And my parents – dear, darling mother, caring, dependable father – no more here on this earth to run to, no more here a safe refuge from the fire. At times like these, Sara was the only one who drew me back to life again, when I would have rather died to rejoin the rest of my family.

Sara was several years older than me. She was actually my cousin, many times removed. Her uncle was my step-uncle, a distant relative by marriage. He had sent her to comfort me when he first heard the news that my sister, brothers, and parents, as well as my unofficial Aunt Polly and Uncle Diggory, had all died in a tragic railway accident. I, by some fluke, had been visiting some friends of mine at that time. Visiting! Staying with my sophisticated, beautiful friends for the weekend, I had not gone to meet the ill-fated train.

Not gone with my family.

I had known for sometime that I was growing distant. My friends, my life, my future was oh so much more intriguing than my backwater little family. I was ashamed of them—ashamed! I blushed now, to think of the sharp-edged thoughts I had nursed the past few years before—before the train. Before the destruction of my world.

For my brothers and my little sister had continued to indulge in speaking wistfully of our little play-world, the world our imaginations had constructed into the back of a wardrobe: _Narnia…_

Visions assaulted my every waking moment from then on. If my year of silence had been one reeking of death and elusive, fleeting voices and images of people and places lost to me, it was as if that moment, a moment otherwise so ordinary I couldn't even remember what I had been doing when _Narnia _whispered to me, just that suddenly the dreams were over, the quiet blankness gone. They poured in: snapshots of hags and snow, of a graveyard of stone statues, of a wild expanse of rustling, dancing trees, of the feel of a well-trained horse under me as I galloped up to an imposing castle, but most of all of the sorrowful, joyful, depth in the eyes of a glorious golden Lion and the knowledge that within those eyes lay everything I could every imagine, and even more.

The Lion.

Sara took me to the hospital after a month.

As I sat in the hospital bed, staring at the stark-white ceiling and listening to the worried whispers about my disintegration back into madness, that I had not yet accepted their deaths, that I would forever be weak-minded and should be sent to an institution for my comfort, those beautiful, overwhelming eyes seemed to challenge me.

_Susan. _

_Susan…_

_Susan do you love me?_

_Of course I do…_

His countenance, if anything, grew more intense. Outside my mind, outside of Narnia, outside of my Lion's eyes, I heard Sara ask me in a curiously choked, gentle voice, "Susan? Would you…do you need anything?"

And with the Lion's breath hot and sweet in my ear, I replied.

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They later told me how devout I was, how Christ-like in my devotion. I want to laugh at them. They couldn't be more wrong, for at that point I had denied my God and my Lion and my family. But that didn't mean that he deserted _me. _In the empty church, I ordered everyone out and stared at the simple cross, highlighted by the colored rays of sunlight from the stained glass windows.

_Do you know this man, Susan?_

_Do you know him?_

And again, _do you know Him, Susan?_

The Lion's eyes regarded me intently. _My child, no matter what form I take or what world I come from, I am here. You are here. Your family is with me. Will you know me?_

That was when I realized.

To Sara's relief, I "recovered" – that is to say, I began to talk and live in the "real world" once more. I brushed my hair. I ate regularly, I replied when spoken to, and I went to church on Sundays. My sophisticated friends purred and pawed my black gowns, exclaimed shrilly over how I had the most fashionable mourning dresses they had laid eyes on. Sara began to go out more often, leaving me behind at home alone without worrying too much about what might happen to me. I began to take an interest in my finances, and the state I was in. Dear mother and darling father had not been especially rich, but they hadn't been in debt. And Aunt Polly and Uncle Diggory had been fairly well off, and left much of their fortune to my siblings and I. As sole inheritor, I found that as long as I lived in moderation, I would not want for the rest of my life.

I took up knitting, laughing a little as I imagined the look I might I have evoked from Edmund if he could observe me like a little old lady by the fire, knitting an unrecognizable lump of blue yarn. I learned to cook new and exotic dishes from India and China, and my eyes watered at the strength of the strange spices that invaded my mouth and nose. I spent hours daydreaming and painting, taking my sketchbook and watercolors to wherever I felt like that day.

Years passed without my acknowledgment or consent. They tipped their hats to me and vanished, perhaps following that invisible route to a wondrous land of talking animals and walking trees. Men came to my door. They left just as quickly. _Queer, that one, _they whispered. _Never quite recovered from her family's deaths. Beautiful girl, but strange. _None came back twice, and as gossip caught fire as gossip does, fewer and fewer still made the trek to meet me. Sara was married in a wedding of pomp and circumstance, the talk of the town. He was a devilish young man, handsome and vigorous with feet that yearned for new places, and a tearful farewell sped my best friend left on this earth on her way to lands further away than thought itself.

I still wait in anticipation. I know one day I'll feel the rough tongue of a glorious lion gently licking me clean and pure again. Someday, I will be called by the one who died in shame, bleeding hot red tears, for me. He whose breath is the breath of life, whose magic restored him to life.

And when that day comes, I'll be waiting in my girlish skirts to greet Aslan once more, and explore a new and yet familiar land myself.

Until then, I wait, and go to mass. Does it matter what form my Savior takes?


End file.
